Friday, October 9, 2015

Bereshit to School Shootings: The Roots and Results of Toxic Masculinity

Last week, on
October 1st, the national news broke over the latest in our nation’s
epidemic of gun violence. Ten people died as a result of the shooter on the
Umpqua Community College campus, and over the course of the last week there has
been a lot of buzz about the source of this violence and what we can do to
address it. The United States is the only developed nation in the world with
this kind of gun violence. According to Mother Jones magazine, there have been
72 mass shootings as since 1982. The definition of “mass shooting” here is that
the killer worked alone (or in the case of Columbine, was the work of two otherwise
“loners”), the violence was carried out in a public place, and the shooter took
the lives of at least four people. So, for example, the shooting on the
Northern Arizona University campus this morning would not be considered in
these statistics, because “only” one person died. The next developed country
with the second highest rate of gun violence, Switzerland (surprisingly), has
about a third of the number of gun-related deaths per year that the U.S. has.
While the U.S. makes up about 4% of the world’s population, it makes up about
42% percent of the world’s gun-owning civilian population. See a pattern yet?

It isn’t just
about how many guns we own, or how the select few number of gun owners misuse
them, the root of the violence is about the culture that promotes it. Plenty of
gun-owners are safe users, but those who do seek to kill do so far too easily,
and after the fact their actions are too often excused as “mental illness,”
despite the fact that mentally ill people are statistically far more likely to
be the victims of violence than perpetrators, and despite the fact that this
diversion tactic away from the conversation on gun control also hasn’t led to
helpful reform in providing access to mental health services for those who need
it, either. The mental illness most of these killers are, or were, suffering
from is toxic masculinity – the ideology that in order to “be a man” you must
be aggressive, out of touch with your feelings, and feel comfortable wielding
weapons and uncomfortable in a position of perceived powerlessness. Even those
who were suffering from a diagnosed mental illness may not have sought the help
they needed because of the desire to appear strong and masculine.

Of the 72
perpetrators of mass shootings, only one was a woman, and 63% were young white
men. A 2013 study at the University of Washington looked at the
disproportionate number of young, white, heterosexual men who committed mass
shootings in the United States and found a correlation between “feelings of
entitlement” and “homicidal revenge” against those perceived as being the
source of the shortcomings on the man’s life. Misogyny and racism often play a
part in these mass shootings. Just yesterday, I read of a teenager in Idaho who
threatened to kill all the cheerleaders at his school because they wouldn’t
send him nudes. We don’t know if he actually had access to guns or exactly how
the authorities responded to his threats, but we know his friend was concerned
enough of their veracity to report him, and the story became another in a national
narrative of violent male entitlement.

Of the many
responses that I’ve seen to the Umpqua Community College shootings, my favorite
is one that has gone viral, though no one seems to know the original author:

"How about we treat every young man who
wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory
48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he
understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of
gun violence... Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make
him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a
strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding
photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and
beg him not to buy a gun. It makes more sense to do this with young men and
guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an
abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?"

Of course, reproductive rights and gun rights
don’t really work as a side by side comparison in a meaningful legalistic way
that might dictate how we approach reform on these issues, but the comparison
here draws attention to the greater issue of what society expects of women and
what society expects of men, and how we respond to the respective
disappointments when either lets us down. From the earliest ages, too often
little girls who behave aggressively or talk too much are stifled, told to sit
down and be quiet, told “Act like a lady,” while little boys are encouraged to
be louder and tougher and when they go too far, parents and teachers will say,
“Boys will be boys.” In middle school, too often girls are sent to the
principal’s office because their blouses don’t cover up their bra straps, but
if a boy snaps that bra strap, well, “Boys will be boys.” And when those little
girls and boys and middle schoolers are all grown up, how are they supposed to
know that it is ok for women to speak up and speak out for their own safety and
health care or that men shouldn’t behave aggressively and violently, when their
whole lives they have heard, “Act like a lady,” but “Boys will be boys”?

Often we think
of the extremists on these issues in terms of the Christian right, but as Jews
who want to properly grapple with the issues on our own terms, we have a
responsibility to acknowledge where some of this toxic masculinity and double
standards between the sexes lies in our own tradition as well. This week’s
parasha is Bereshit. I tend to think of the images of “The Fall” and Eve as the
“mother of all sin” as very Christian concepts, and assumed it was due to some
pervasive Christian ideology that we continue to frame our Genesis story this
way, even occasionally as Jews. But after reading the analysis of Avivah
Gottlieb Zornberg in her book, The Murmuring Deep, I feel like I have
finally seen clearly how much is in the text itself, and how so much of the
double standards we continue to live with today really emanate directly out
from Genesis two, the Adam and Eve story. In a key passage that has forever
changed the way I read our texts, Zornberg says, “Eve stands, then, at the hub
of the narrative of seduction; she is both object and subject of this
treacherous activity. She has gone down in cultural memory as both feeble and
slyly powerful; incapable of resisting seduction, she is nevertheless
irresistibly seductive. The weak link between the serpent and Adam, she has
borne the brunt of responsibility for events read, quite simply, as a Fall.”
Zornberg also later points out that the serpent’s awareness of Eve’s weakness
and strength in the arts of seduction was what so easily allowed him to
manipulate her and Adam to transgress, validating the lasting view of Eve, “and
through her, of all women,” as “sinister and serpentine.”

This is where I
become certain that it is not the fault of pervasive medieval Christianity
informing an uncomfortable understanding of this text. This is the basis of
patriarchy and a culture in which victim blaming, objectification, excusing of
male violence, and a denial of women’s voices are still pervasive even to this
day and in the progressive Western world. This is the crux of our double standards
and the promotion of toxic masculinity teaching men to stifle their feelings.
From the beginning of time we have read and believed that a woman is
simultaneously too weak to resist a male’s instruction or her own base
instincts and is too seductive to expect a man to resist. It is her own fault
she allows herself to be manipulated, but it’s also her fault that Adam allows
himself to be manipulated by her. Women seeking abortions are told to take
responsibility for their actions, but men who shoot people are given a pass for
responsibility, and the men who defund women’s healthcare centers while
maintaining loose gun laws that allow this reality say, “Stuff happens.” Act
like a lady, but boys will be boys.

Although we may
be fighting thousands upon thousands of years of this mentality, I think we are
up to the challenge. It is past time to change our double standards and our
view of autonomy for men and women. The parasha also contains a verse in which
Adam proclaims Eve the “mother of all life,” and Zornberg points out that what
we categorize as a “Fall” is really an outward motion: the expulsion from Eden
into a new world. The new reality Eve has borne to us is harder, for sure, but
also richer and fuller. It is only through obtaining the knowledge of good and
evil did we really become fully human, in relationship with God. Instead of
giving Eve all of the blame or credit, we should recognize that there are at
least three “people” (though not human, the serpent is undoubtedly a person)
with full agency participating in this text (possibly four; God’s role in
causing this narrative to play out is a little more vague). It is in our
grappling with good and evil and rights and privileges and law-making that we
become fully human. I think it is absolutely time for us to promote a new, and
just as legitimate, reading of this story, one in which we can establish that
each and every person is accountable for his or her own actions, and each and
every person should have access to that which they need to feel protected and
cared for in this world without harming others. Maybe if we start at the
source, we really can reframe our cultural shortcomings to become a truly equal
and safe society for everyone. May we find holiness in our wrestling with
difficult realities, may we find peace outside the Garden of Eden, and may our
legislators find an agreement that will allow all Americans to feel secure.
Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

1 comment:

This piece generated great conversation in the Friends and Seekers Sunday School class of Inman United Methodist Church in Inman, SC. However, much of the conversation in the class was just folks wrangling with their positions on gun control laws. There were more conversations after class about how mass shootings of today relate to the Adam and Eve story. Your thoughts, ideas, and connections got us old folks thinking and talking in new ways. Thank you.Vicki McCartha